R.I.P. retread — Baby, It’s Cold Outside: Happy Holidays from Cynthia Myers, Miss December 1968

Been buried in academic work, but I needed to throw out a quick, sad retread of Ms. Myers’ “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” post. Beautiful, adventurous Cynthia passed away yesterday of undisclosed causes, per Hef.

R.I.P., Ms. Myers (9/12/50-11/4/11).

Photographed by Pompeo Posar.

“Wholly Toledo!” is the name of the article that accompanies the pictorial for the lovely and talented Cynthia Myers, Playboy’s Miss December 1968. Her wildly popular centerfold shot her to stardom among the troops in Vietnam, and a pinup of her is featured in the film Hamburger Hill. She has been a teen model, a television personality, played a lesbian songstress in one of the most famous camp films out there, and become an unwitting space cowgirl in her 60 years on this planet. Buckle up, because here we go!

Cynthia wrote to Playboy a few years ago, informing us that she’d like to be considered as a centerfold beauty. Assistant Picture Editor Marilyn Grabowski answered with a reminder that our Playmates must be of legal age but that Cynthia should keep in touch. She did just that.

Well, kind of.

The shoot was in June of ’68, and Ms. Meyers was born in September of ’50, but Playboy waited until Cynthia was comfortably 18 to publish her pictorial. It had become common practice for the magazine after the scandal with Elizabeth Ann Roberts.

In fact, the most recently featured “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” playmate, the fantastic Susan Bernard, was also 17 at her photoshoot and saw her spread published after she turned 18.

Posing underage for Playboy is not the only common ground between Ms. Bernard and Ms. Myers. While Ms. Bernard was featured in Russ Meyers’ cult classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, today’s special gal starred in his 1970 film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

I promise to have a full-out Movie Moment for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls one of these days. For my friend’s recent 31st birthday, I sent him a picture of the cast of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls with him tagged as Dolly Read and me as Cynthia Myers. I explained that I originally had me as Dolly and him as Cynthia, but I switched it because it was his birthday.

You know Roger Ebert wrote it? I don’t think he ever gets to criticize a movie again.

Cynthia is pictured reading a five-year-old palmistry pamphlet about what the following year once held for her because she placed a large credulity in psychic phenomenon.

“I’ve known since I was 15 that I’d be a Playmate. It’s almost as if this had been fated to happen.” Cynthia’s penchant for precognition can be traced to her early teens.

(Ibid.)

“A junior high school friend of mine in Toledo,” she says, “was a nut on palmistry, astrology and even reading tea leaves and crystal balls. Like most people, I thought is was just a bunch of baloney. But when I began reading about prophets like Edgar Cayce, I began to realize that there are strange spiritual forces in the world undreamed of even in The Playboy Philosophy.”

(Ibid.)

Ms. Myers, I think you’d be surprised by what the Playboy philosophy can dream of.

In 1994, it was revealed that a picture from Ms. Myers’ centerfold pictorial was among several that crafty NASA jokesters have launched in to space over the years. Ms. Myers, together with Leslie Bianchini, Angela Dorian, and Reagan Wilson, was snuck in to the checklist for the Apollo 12 mission that was placed in astronauts’ suit cuff on their trip to the moon in November of 1969. Ms. Myers specifically took her space journey with astronaut Al Bean.

Don’t forget: Describe the protruberances.

Boobs : Geeks :: Horse : Carriage. I think it’s kind of funny and sweet.

And the gals didn’t just go up in the lunar landing module: they straight moon walked. The astronauts found their pictures while fulfilling their extravehicular (read: outside the module on the lunar surface) mission duties on the moon itself.

Pete Conrad got Miss September 1967, Angela Dorian, (“Seen any interesting hills and valleys?”) and Miss October 1967, Reagan Wilson (“Preferred tether partner”). Al Bean got Miss December 1968, Cynthia Myers (“Don’t forget — Describe the protuberances”), and Miss January 1969, Leslie Bianchini (“Survey — her activity”).

(“Playboy Playmates pranked into Apollo 12 mission checklists.” January 13, 2007. BoingBoing.net.)

Conrad told us in 1994: “I had no idea they were with us. It wasn’t until we actually got out on the lunar surface and were well into our first moon walk that I found them.” Bean recalled: “It was about two and a half hours into the extravehicular activity. I flipped the page over and there she was. I hopped over to where Pete was and showed him mine, and he showed me his.”

(Ibid.)

A large, color version of the shot of Cynthia that was smuggled up to the moon in the Apollo 12.

Lest we forget, the lovely and talented DeDe Lind, Miss August 1967 and, like Cynthia, one of the most popular Playmates in the magazine’s history, also rode shotgun on the Apollo 12 mission. She was in the control console, her picture labelled, “Map of a heavenly body.”

I always feel compelled when talking about the Playmate pictures and NASA to bring up the fact that my sorority’s badge is on the moon. Neil Armstrong put it there for his wife. It’s my sorority’s badge and it is on the moon. The moon that is in space. Sorry, but I get pretty cocky and excited by that. Tell a friend.

This much more recent picture of Ms. Myers just might get her kicked out of the Red Hat Society.

Can our prescient Playmate predict anything about her future? “I’m going to be an actress,” she says simply. “Notice I didn’t say ‘I’d like to be,’ but ‘I’m going to be.’ I don’t know how good I’ll be as an actress, but I’ll be one.”

(“Wholly Toledo!” Playboy. December 1968.)

Judging from her track record as a prophetess — and from her already abundant attributes — we’d like to venture a prediction of our own: Playmatehood should be just the beginning for the remarkable Miss Myers.
(Ibid.)

Baby, It’s Cold Outside: Happy Holidays from Cynthia Myers, Miss December 1968

Photographed by Pompeo Posar.

“Wholly Toledo!” is the name of the article that accompanies the pictorial for the lovely and talented Cynthia Myers, Playboy’s Miss December 1968. Her wildly popular centerfold shot her to stardom among the troops in Vietnam, and a pinup of her is featured in the film Hamburger Hill. She has been a teen model, a television personality, played a lesbian songstress in one of the most famous camp films out there, and become an unwitting space cowgirl in her 60 years on this planet. Buckle up, because here we go!

Cynthia wrote to Playboy a few years ago, informing us that she’d like to be considered as a centerfold beauty. Assistant Picture Editor Marilyn Grabowski answered with a reminder that our Playmates must be of legal age but that Cynthia should keep in touch. She did just that.

Well, kind of.

The shot was in June of ’68, and Ms. Meyers was born in September of ’50, but Playboy waited until Cynthia was comfortably 18 to publish her pictorial. It had become common practice for the magazine after the scandal with Elizabeth Ann Roberts.

In fact, the most recently featured “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” playmate, the fantastic Susan Bernard, was also 17 at her photoshoot and saw her spread published after she turned 18.

Posing underage for Playboy is not the only common ground between Ms. Bernard and Ms. Myers. While Ms. Bernard was featured in Russ Meyers’ cult classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, today’s special gal starred in his 1970 film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

I promise to have a full-out Movie Moment for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls one of these days. For my friend’s recent 31st birthday, I sent him a picture of the cast of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls with him tagged as Dolly Read and me as Cynthia Myers. I explained that I originally had me as Dolly and him as Cynthia, but I switched it because it was his birthday.

You know Roger Ebert wrote it? I don’t think he ever gets to criticize a movie again.

Cynthia is pictured reading a five-year-old palmistry pamphlet about what the following year once held for her because she placed a large credulity in psychic phenomenon.

“I’ve known since I was 15 that I’d be a Playmate. It’s almost as if this had been fated to happen.” Cynthia’s penchant for precognition can be traced to her early teens.

(Ibid.)

“A junior high school friend of mine in Toledo,” she says, “was a nut on palmistry, astrology and even reading tea leaves and crystal balls. Like most people, I thought is was just a bunch of baloney. But when I began reading about prophets like Edgar Cayce, I began to realize that there are strange spiritual forces in the world undreamed of even in The Playboy Philosophy.”

(Ibid.)

Ms. Myers, I think you’d be surprised by what the Playboy philosophy can dream of.

In 1994, it was revealed that a picture from Ms. Myers’ centerfold pictorial was among several that crafty NASA jokesters have launched in to space over the years. Ms. Myers, together with Leslie Bianchini, Angela Dorian, and Reagan Wilson, was snuck in to the checklist for the Apollo 12 mission that was placed in astronauts’ suit cuff on their trip to the moon in November of 1969. Ms. Myers specifically took her space journey with astronaut Al Bean.

Don’t forget: Describe the protruberances.

Boobs : Geeks :: Horse : Carriage. I think it’s kind of funny and sweet.

And the gals didn’t just go up in the lunar landing module: they straight moon walked. The astronauts found their pictures while fulfilling their extravehicular (read: outside the module on the lunar surface) mission duties on the moon itself.

Pete Conrad got Miss September 1967, Angela Dorian, (“Seen any interesting hills and valleys?”) and Miss October 1967, Reagan Wilson (“Preferred tether partner”). Al Bean got Miss December 1968, Cynthia Myers (“Don’t forget — Describe the protuberances”), and Miss January 1969, Leslie Bianchini (“Survey — her activity”).

(“Playboy Playmates pranked into Apollo 12 mission checklists.” January 13, 2007. BoingBoing.net.)

Conrad told us in 1994: “I had no idea they were with us. It wasn’t until we actually got out on the lunar surface and were well into our first moon walk that I found them.” Bean recalled: “It was about two and a half hours into the extravehicular activity. I flipped the page over and there she was. I hopped over to where Pete was and showed him mine, and he showed me his.”

(Ibid.)

A large, color version of the shot of Cynthia that was smuggled up to the moon in the Apollo 12.

Lest we forget, the lovely and talented DeDe Lind, Miss August 1967 and, like Cynthia, one of the most popular Playmates in the magazine’s history, also rode shotgun on the Apollo 12 mission. She was in the control console, her picture labelled, “Map of a heavenly body.”

I always feel compelled when talking about the Playmate pictures and NASA to bring up the fact that my sorority’s badge is on the moon. Neil Armstrong put it there for his wife. It’s my sorority’s badge and it is on the moon. The moon that is in space. Sorry, but I get pretty cocky and excited by that. Tell a friend.

This much more recent picture of Ms. Myers just might get her kicked out of the Red Hat Society.

Can our prescient Playmate predict anything about her future? “I’m going to be an actress,” she says simply. “Notice I didn’t say ‘I’d like to be,’ but ‘I’m going to be.’ I don’t know how good I’ll be as an actress, but I’ll be one.”

(“Wholly Toledo!” Playboy. December 1968.)

Judging from her track record as a prophetess — and from her already abundant attributes — we’d like to venture a prediction of our own: Playmatehood should be just the beginning for the remarkable Miss Myers.
(Ibid.)

The Girls of Summer: Gale Olson, Miss August 1968

Adorable cuteness photographed by Ron Vogel. Brain-asplosions. See what I mean about the ’60’s being the Heyday?

Your Miss August 1968 was the lovely and talented Gale Olson, who as you can see didn’t need cheesecake poses and a strained, pageanty smile to turn in an adorable and upbeat photoshoot for this issue of Playboy.

It’s really interesting how some of the playmates are capable of keeping the material erotic instead of porny. I don’t know that I can pinpoint the exact difference … but I look at this shoot, and I look at something like the gatefold of Miss November 1995, Holly Witt, and I feel like Edwin Meese quoting Justice Potter Stewart about classing porn: I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.

Kind of funny since he was describing the opposite; Meese made his referential remark in regard to the history in America of attempts at distinguishing sexually themed content from straight-up obscenity. I’m kind of talking about the reverse. Either way, it’s a dicey issue. Reagan appointed Meese in 1985 to head the Meese Commission, also called the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, who published their report in 1986 to lip-smackingly salacious public interest. Everyone loves a good witch hunt, am I right?

I mentioned all these shenanigans once back in November when we talked about the experiences of Miss November 1986, Donna Edmondson, the Virgin Playmate who got hit with a steamy little shitstorm of media criticism. As though it were her fault. The Meese Commission’s report on pornography had the moral majority howling for naked people’s blood and she got caught in the middle. And don’t get me started on what happened fifteen years later — as we still live in a nation of, if not puritans, then at least sweaty hypocrites — to sweet Lindsey Vuolo, Miss November 2001, with that publicity-seeking, accusatory, diminishing misogynist Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. Ugh.

I almost didn’t include this shot because it wasn’t very sharp or high-quality, but then as I contemplated it, I decided I actually liked the hazy quality, and the visible wrinkles in the image became dear and touching to me. There is something incredibly personal and human about the almost sad little private story one must conclude has lead to its well-worn threadbareness. Someone scanned this one with love, having either held on to it themselves, or acquired it from someone who had, for a long time. That idea is interesting as hell to me. What would someone make of the objects — letters, pictures, cards, old shirts — that you have secretly packed along with you to every new home in which you live, all these years, because of an emotional value, an identity-establishing familiarity, that far exceeds those objects’ original costs?

Pyjama Jam!

I do not want to use the word sentimental, per se, because these can be things that you keep for the gut, visceral reaction they can still incite. These are things that are part of the rhythms of your mind and body that I’m talking about, things worth holding on to because they are become part of how you operate. A roadmap to the art of you being “You” is this small collection of things so beloved that calling them cherished diminishes their import. These objects which represent long-passed moments or ways of feeling are part and parcel of the entirety of your experiences, your past, your emotions and stomach acid and sweat.

Things that have lasted longer than the relationships from which they came or phases in your mode of dress and hairstyle. To everyone else, because these objects are mixed in with other items, there is no shine or particularity about them. Only you know.

It is so incredibly personal and private, but the plain fact is that it will be gone through and picked over, someday, that collection of your private, true “belongings.” Because you’ll be dead, and those things that mean so much to you, those talismans of purpose and associative emotional properties won’t mean anything to anyone anymore.

I apologize. That was really downbeat. I’m getting close to a hard-hitting deathiversary (if you will) and I get all fucked up over it. Still. No need to drag anyone along.

Whew! Hot cross buns, enough with the self-audit, and enough with the needless sex-in-America history lessons as I retread ground I have already indignantly covered. Sorry — let’s get on with Ms. Olson!

The Olsons, who now live in Costa Mesa, are a large, closely knit family. “Having six brothers and three sisters really teaches you a lot about sharing things, materially and emotionally,” Gale says. Our August Playmate hopes one day to raise a family almost as large, but that won’t come about until she first fully satisfies her penchant for adventure.

(“Star-Spangled and Starry-Eyed.” Playboy, August 1968.)

“Last year I decided to become an astronaut, so I called the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Houston to find out qualification requirements.” Gale spent enough time being briefed on the phone by NASA officials to acquire four pages of notes. “So far, things are turning out fine for me,” she reports.

(Ibid.)

A model (36-22-35) of American femininity, Gale (who delivered talks on girl scouting over German television) stays in shape by practicing ballet and exercising, and plans to study Tahitian dancing next year.

(Ibid.)

I have said before that we superfly Girl Scouts are a bombass bunch. Take it to the bank.

“I think every girl who has the figure for it wishes she could be a Playmate, and I’m no exception,” [Gale] observes. “All I can say is that I was lucky!”

Lucky Gale, lucky readers.

(Ibid.)

Photographed by by Stephen Wayda and Barry Fontenot. Very close to the same pose!
And thirty-one years later, the readers were lucky again when Ms. Olson’s daughter, the lovely and talented Crystal McCahill, above, was Playmate of the Month for Playboy’s May 2009 issue.

It’s a different kind of Darwin Award: the Playmate gene, passed from mother to daughter, ensuring survival of the fittest and constant attention from males of the species. Examine the evidence before you in the curvy form of Crystal McCahill, the 25-year-old daughter of Miss August 1968 Gale Olson.

(“It’s Crystal Clear.” Playboy, May 2009.)

\

“I think every girl who has the figure for it wishes she could be a Playmate, and I’m no exception,” said Gale in her Playmate interview. “All I can say is, I am lucky!” Yet when luck strikes twice, it seems less like luck than destiny. It has happened just once before, when Miss December 1960 Carol Eden saw her daughter Simone grace the Centerfold in February 1989.

Says the Illinois-born Crystal, “I remember telling my brothers and sisters, ‘I’m going to do that one day. I’m going to do the exact same pose.'”

(Ibid.)

A fun-loving, positive, and thoroughly modern gal, you may follow Ms. Olson’s present doings on the twitter.

This picture is one of my favorites from the shoot. From a strictly aesthetic point of view it may possibly eclipse for me even the swan-butt ones. I love the movement and the colors in this composition. The impact of the yellow in all those little flowers around her is joyful and riotous, and her closed eyes imply a savoring of the moment. There is nothing forced or deliberate in this picture. It’s excellent.

The cover was photographed by Mario Casilli and Caroll Baker. The pose and styling of the model, Aino Korva — Miss Universe Denmark 1963, and first-runner-up in the 1963 Miss Universe pageant (in which Peter “Dr. Strangelove/The Pink Panther” Sellers was one of the judges!!), making her bid the closest a Dane has ever come to winning the title — are strikingly similar to the centerfold of Miss July 1967, Heather Ryan. I’m saving the lovely and talented Ms. Ryan for later this month. But you’ll see what I mean then.

As with the post on the lovely and talented Miss March 1967, Fran Gerard, I must throw up huge thanks to Fabrizio, an awesome and generous moderator over at the vintage erotica forums, which are free, well-moderated, full of fun, and they won’t give your computer any wack infections or the hantavirus. Grazie, bello♥!, and, to the rest of you, run — don’t walk — to the site. Enjoy!

March Madness: Priscilla Wright, Miss March 1966

Dig those tanlines. Miss March 1966 was the lovely and talented Priscilla Wright, who preferred to go by Pat and was one helluva golfer.

Photographed by Mario Casilli.

This is a great, breezy shoot that emphasizes Ms. Wright’s love of the outdoors and brisk, sporty style. I really dig it.

My favorite shot.

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Praesent vitae sem tortor, quis imperdiet lacus. Nullam lectus diam, feugiat at varius in, sagittis eget sem. Vivamus ut ipsum quam. Duis gravida iaculis purus, quis tincidunt diam lacinia vitae. Nunc imperdiet, metus vel cursus ultrices, libero neque fringilla eros, ut vestibulum massa lacus et tortor. Sed eu tortor lorem, pharetra tempus eros. Ut ornare mauris quis orci molestie mattis. Vestibulum justo magna, posuere sed ullamcorper id, blandit nec orci. Donec luctus, mauris ut luctus scelerisque, dolor elit sagittis turpis, vel posuere libero lacus ut sem. Aenean nec velit urna. Quisque rutrum consectetur turpis vitae interdum. Etiam condimentum tristique neque a mattis. Aliquam commodo, enim at convallis sagittis, nibh quam sodales dolor, vitae bibendum lorem nisl eu magna. Phasellus tempor lectus venenatis augue consequat laoreet. Morbi eleifend lorem quis felis porttitor eget elementum nulla sodales. Donec id mollis eros. Integer pretium posuere nulla ut aliquet. Vestibulum arcu lorem, malesuada sit amet elementum quis, commodo sed urna. Pellentesque quis nisl eget augue vehicula aliquet vel nec velit. Maecenas pharetra dictum cursus.

Etiam ac velit lobortis dui accumsan posuere condimentum et justo. Vestibulum eu metus placerat sem faucibus tempus sit amet ut nulla. Proin posuere, turpis vitae aliquet tempus, mauris metus fringilla tellus, eget fringilla ipsum tellus vel lectus. Etiam eu pharetra arcu. Phasellus eget condimentum leo. Maecenas ligula elit, molestie eget laoreet id, mollis at ipsum. Cras in tristique sem. Curabitur consectetur sodales nibh sit amet eleifend. Integer ut sapien in enim iaculis euismod. Aliquam non malesuada erat. Aenean ac adipiscing purus. Phasellus sodales, arcu in ultrices tempus, ante ante commodo dui, pulvinar dictum magna ante non ipsum.

Lorem Ipsum-ing it up ’til I have time to get back in here and add all my actual text: my grandmother was having a really great day and we’d been having fun, but the mail still hasn’t come with a new box of checks for her and she’s beginning to get pretty nervous. I’m going to suggest we make smoothies (she loves the blender because the container is clear and she gets a kick out of watching it whir — the Osterizer she has had since the 50’s has a silver cup and she likes ours better). I could’ve just left no text in between, but I’m too cool and Old School. So old school I drive a yellow bus with gothic arched windows!, to quote Achewood. Catch you on the flip, ASAP.

edit: We made dyed-green mousse instead.

Special thanks to marxz on the v-e forums.

March Madness: Fran Gerard, Miss March 1967

I was fortunate enough to stumble over the entire original layout and spread of the Playboy issue featuring the very lovely and very talented Ms. Fran Gerard, Miss March 1967.

Photographed by Mario Casilli and Gene Trindl. (Color work by Casilli, B&W shots by Trindl, according to the orig. spread’s credits)

We predict a sparkling future for our heavenly-bodied Miss March. Generously configured Fran Gerard is a girl for the stars. “We’re forever searching the cosmos for new meanings.” (“Stars In Her Eyes,” Playboy, March 1967.)

The specs-sporting young Ms. Gerard worked as an astrologer’s assistant (zodiac quackery rears its head AGAIN) in L.A. at the time of her appearance, so they made a big deal out of that.

But the main thing of her is that she is tied right up there with Janet Lupo, Cynthia Myers, etc, for the largest natural breasts ever to be featured in Playboy.

As it was quite sometime before Janet, Cyndi, Roberta Vasquez, Alana Soares, et al came along to potentially unseat Ms. Gerard as undisputed mammary queen (I am not bothering to list the silicone sweethearts whose plastic racks match the numbers in name only and never rate so high in the eyes of the lord), she has understandably enjoyed long-lasting and tremendous fame in the Playboy world.

A “little looker,” her Playmate data sheet reports she was just 5’2″ tall at the time of her appearance in the magazine at the alleged age of 19. Holy chumbuckets, I cannot even imagine the back trouble the girl had to have had by age 30. Sorry if that deglamourizes things, but dang. That’s some serious rackage to haul around for a chick that only weighed around 110.

More than just a pretty face hovering over likely-uncomfortably-giant knockers, Ms. Gerard was a genuinely swingin’ chick with a good head on her small shoulders. And great taste in music!

Our plenipotent Playmate is as versant with combos as with cosmos: “Charlie Parker’s ‘Ornithology’ was the greatest single ever made,” says Fran, “and I think E.S.P. by Miles Davis is the best LP.” Sinatra is her favorite singer, especially “Cottage for Sale.” (Ibid.)

She says, “[I] like artists Marc Chagall and Salvador Dali. They capture so much of the glory of the universe in their work, but I don’t think I’m being stuffy: I like ‘Batman,’ too!” (Ibid.)

“Batman”? Heyoooo! Actually, I have also always liked Chagall’s work, especially this one piece he did that told a Russian folk tale, if I’m remembering rightly… Maybe later this week I’ll throw up some stuff about him.

Fran credits another favorite, a book, with being the source of all this happiness and satisfaction. “It’s The Magic of Believing by C. M. Bristol. It helps you to think positively.” (Ibid.)

Fran’s favorite book is still in print. It is also available for purchase as an ebook. Here’s an excerpt from the first few paragraphs:

Is there some force, or factor, or power, or science—call it what you will—which a few people understand and use to overcome their difficulties and achieve outstanding success? I firmly believe that there is, and it is my purpose in this book to try to explain it so that you can use it if you desire.

Around 1933 the financial editor of a great Los Angeles newspaper attended lectures I gave to financial men in that city and read my brochure T.N.T.—It Rocks the Earth. Afterwards, he wrote, “You have caught from the ether something that has a mystical quality—a something that explains the magic of coincidence, the mystery of what makes men lucky.”

(source, and please do not consider the link an endorsement)

Wow, what is amazing about that is it could have been written, like, yesterday, except replace “1933” in the suspiciously specious and detail-lacking anecdote with “2003.” I did not think people were marketing murky bullshit that long ago, but I live to be surprised. I should’ve known, I suppose, given all the snake oil salesmen and shenaniganizers who’ve always walked this earth conning money out of suckers. Like the rightly revered Msr. Barnum observed, there is one born every minute.

I think I will try my hand at tossing off a few sentences.

A few years ago, I was addressing a colony of junebugs at an annual meeting. After the meeting, a junebug who had just been raised to upper hive-management approached me and invited me to have a drink. He told me that he had seen me speak at a junebug team-building conference near an abandoned swingset only six months earlier, and had returned to his nest eager to apply the Simple Principles that I teach. Within just a few months, he had already been promoted above his boss and was handling new junebug regions of management!

Like so many countless others that I have been happy to help, this junebug told me in that hotel bar that he would have never believed the success and accomplishments he would achieve in such a short time just by following these three simple steps to harnessing the power of YOUR potential to do Great Things!

(E., Right Here, Right Now.)

How did that sound? Would you buy my shit? No? I’m huge in junebug circles, picking up sales in bee hives, and keep it between us but I think I’m about to crack the highly elusive ladybug market. (What I am saying is that I think this is all fishsticks and curried potatoes, this malarkey. Positive thinking is very powerful, yes, and important to your overall well-being, but so is hustling your buns to earn a simple living and have rich relationships with loved ones rather than sucking down cultish nonsense like coca-cola and craving weird amounts of power through ESP. Mad love and respect to Ms. Gerard, but come on.)

I think this is the best shot of the lot.

The positively smashing Miss Gerard’s idea of a perfect man? Clark Gable. “Remember him as Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind? He was too much,” says Fran appreciatively. (“Stars In Her Eyes.”)

Yes, I particularly enjoyed the scene where he got ten kinds of drunk and told Scarlett he was going to crush her head like a walnut, slapped her around a little, and then took her upstairs for some rough sex. You’re probably thinking that is some feminist, critical statement mired in sarcasm: you are sadly wrong. I’m messed up I guess, but I think that saucy Scarlett needs slapped around pretty much every goddamned minute of the day and Rhett was born for the job. They are a nasty, scheming, firey-eyed match made in hell and I think it makes an excellent and exciting love story, in a very dark and ugly way for which it seldom gets credit. So, today I say to you, Margaret Mitchell: Well done, sir.

The man who did the b&w work for this spread, Gene Trindl, was best known as a photographer for TV Guide. He shot over 800 spreads for them, and 200 covers. Dang, right? He died of pancreatic cancer June 29, 2004, two years after my cousin Tom and thirty-seven years after Jayne Mansfield. RIP, Mr. Trendl.

TURN-ONS: High fashion, antiques.
TURNOFFS: Arrogance, people and their trivial problems.

(Playmate datasheet.)

Um … you hate arrogance, but you also hate people and their “trivial problems”? Okay. The kettle called … said something about how you are the black one? No need to call back.

DID YOU KNOW? I’m an assistant to astrologer Jack Gemini.
PEOPLE I ADMIRE: My parents, for the great job they did raising me.
FAVORITE MUSIC: Jazz.

(Ibid.)

I have googled the crap out of Jack Gemini, John Gemini, LA Astrologers in the 1960’s, and am coming up triple goose eggs. If you got a line on him, I’m interested.

So many thousands of thanks to my usual sources but in this case also special singling out for lovin’s to dear Fabrizio, an awesome and generous moderator over at the vintage erotica forums, from whom the majority of these great shots came!

Bello, sono incredibili, e grazie sempre per tutte immagini meravigliose. Molti baci, ♥ mua-mua! I owe you big-time, my good man, and I strongly encourage readers to swing over to the forums. They’re free, well-moderated, full of fun, and they won’t give your computer any wack infections or the hantavirus. Enjoy!

Here are the scans of the original b&w article accompanying the gatefold and color spread.

March Madness: Jennifer Miriam, Miss March 1997

Miss March 1997 was the lovely and talented Jennifer Miriam, and she is a delightful little pistol. You’re going to love her. Super-awesome!

Photographed by Arny Freytag and Stephen Wayda.

Lord, how I enjoy the glorious 90’s-rifficness of this centerfold photograph. Let me count the ways.

Neon x-treme snowsports gear: check.

Jennifer Aniston “Friends” shag: check.

Hemp woven choker: check.

Brown lipliner with pinky-nude lipstick: check.

Sunflower doodles on stockings: check.

Frayed blue denim top: check.

Is it also a corset?: double-check!

Does the corset lace-up with light colored leather straps?: you bet your sweet ass it does.

Crank up the Cranberries, bust out the hacky-sack, and let’s let it linnnnger, chitlins!

Jennifer grew up in Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, Colorado and Texas. Moving frequently taught her how to meet people, she says. She also learned how to be the class clown.

“Every time the teacher would leave the room,” she remembers, “I would entertain the class. I got sent home a lot. Like the time in first grade when I crawled under my desk and roared like a lion.” (“Maid Miriam.” Bain, Julie J. Playboy. March 1997.)

Oh, my effing god, that is so cute.

TURNOFFS: Anyone who tries to suppress the free spirit in me!
FAVORITE DISHES: Chicken-fried steak, biscuits, cheesy mashed potatoes, pecan pie — and the man who appreciates a woman with healthy appetites.
I EXPOSE MYSELF TO: New Orleans blues, Charles Bukowski poetry, art-house films, Andy Warhol paintings and the guitar player in the corner of the cafe.

(Playmate data sheet.)

Hell yeah, real food, Bukowski, and exposing yourself to musicians!

“I dated an actor once who called me from a golf course on his cellular phone. I said, ‘Never mind!’ He was into the right cars, the right possessions. I hate that. I would rather have a guy in a beat-up pickup who’s nice to me and brings me flowers he picked himself.” (“Maid Miriam.”)

Jeezy Creezy. I love this woman.

This 24-year-old model, actor and hotel concierge believes in past lives. She says she was a priestess who met, and lost, her soul mate 2000 years ago — and she’s been missing him in all her lives since. But a psychic told her she would meet him again in two years. She can’t wait. (Ibid.)

She demands of any guy she dates: “‘Let me be me!’ I like people who like to have fun and aren’t worried about what other people think. If he says, ‘You can’t do that,’ I say, ‘Bye.'” (Ibid.)

In her Playmate interview, Ms. Miriam stressed that her emphasis with acting was on finding roles in meaningful, small films. She had featured parts in The Newton Boys and Pressurecooker, before leaving Hollywood, a move which is not too surprising coming from a woman who does not like falseness and getting her free spirit hemmed in. Good on her for really sussing out the depth of her dreams! She is married with two children, and now makes her living as an artist.

March Madness: Marian Stafford, Miss March 1956

The lovely and talented Marian Stafford, Playboy‘s Miss March 1956, is adorable and also full of all kinds of noteworthiness.

Photographed by Ruth Sondak.

First, Ms. Stafford was the first gatefold model to get a three page pull-out centerfold: the real deal, the whole fold-out enchilada. This has obviously become a trademark of not just Playboy but a widely-copied staple of the porn mag world as a whole. Way to go, twinkie!

Unusually, as you can see from the above caption, the lead credited photographer of Ms. Stafford’s shoot was a woman. Ruth Sondak seems to have been an active New York photographer on whom I am having trouble finding complete biographical data.

I found this link to an interview about Greenwich Village anti-Vietnam War protesters, which had circa-70’s pictures credited as being taken by Ruth accompanying the article, and a 1993 NYT obit that included a picture of a famous educator that was photographed by Ruth in New York in 1972. The links to the photos in both the obit and the war-resisters’ page were no longer active, so I can’t even say I have seen other pictures by her other than these of Ms. Stafford. That’s about all I got on that angle so far. I’ll keep digging.

Okay, so you may be wondering why Ms. Stafford is ripping up a TV Guide in the two color shots of this spread. It’s not a Sinead O’Connor protest or anything — Ms. Stafford was first “discovered” on the boob-tube in the audience of a show, and became a main stage attraction herself not long after.

This month’s Playmate is a little girl with big television aspirations. Her name is Marian Stafford and she packs a lot of woman into 5’3″. She wants to be an actress, but so far most of her TV experience has been confined to smiling prettily in commercials for products like Tintair, Pall Mall and Jantzen; she has helped advertise Revlon on The $64,000 Question and RCA Victor on the video version of Our Town. She has had a walk-on in a Kraft Theater production and small speaking parts in two Robert Montgomery shows. (“Playboy’s TV Playmate,” Playboy, March 1956.)

But her most unique television experience is as a human test pattern for Max Leibman spectaculars, where she spends hours before NBC color cameras during rehearsals and is never seen by the audience. (Ibid.)

Ms. Stafford did make it back in front of cameras, regularly appearing on shows such as The $64,000 Question and Treasure Hunt. Her adorable pretty-princess looks and sweet nature also scored her the part of Mistress of Ceremonies on the 11-episode children’s story hour show The Big Fun Carnival in 1957. Get it, girl!

One of the coolest parts of this issue was a short story by Ray Bradbury titled “The First Night of Lent,” about a good-natured and laconic Irish driver named Nick whom a writer employs while he is working on a screenplay in Dublin. The driver gives up drinking for Lent and becomes a reckless maniac, incapable of sorting through the richness of life’s sensory overload and focusing on one thing at a time: he needs alcohol to make it through the day, because the Irish are such finely tuned, sensitive beings that sobriety is an innavigable misery to them. At the end, the screenplay writer gives Nick money and begs him to start drinking again. It’s a mainly classist and racist but still kind of fun story, and Ray Bradbury is my all-time favorite sci-fi writer of all time* so I let him off the hook, cultural pride notwithstanding.

excerpt from the googlebooks. give it a spin, dudes, and please consider writing to your congressmen urging them to protect free lit on the net! LIBRARIES FOREVER!

Marian Stafford is one of the few playmates to model both as the gatefold and cover girls. Do you get the cover idea? The bunny is a producer watching her do her NBC color-test job. Super-cute. Again — get it, girl!

*Nickel in the mail to the first person who gets the “all-time-favorite of all time” movie line reference.

Valentine Vixen — Nancy Jo Hooper, Miss February 1964

The lovely and talented Nancy Jo Hooper was, in addition to being a born model and Playboy‘s Miss February 1964, several other “Misses” as well. We will get there.

Photographed by Pompeo Posar.

I say she was a born model because she knows what she is supposed to be selling here — but, like any good model, she is “selling” it by dint of excellent effort, and not necessarily because she “feels” it.

Though she oozes that kind of satisfied, curvy, cat-like sexuality that made Sophia Loren and Elizabeth Taylor famous, Pompeo Posar said in the Playmate Book that, when he asked Nancy to give him a pose that was “a little more sexy,” she responded immediately, “But I don’t know anything about sex!” a disarmingly nervous and virginal response from a practical woman with some chutzpah and a good gift for acting, but a more bookish actual personality.

From the heart of the old Confederacy we recently received a pair of candid snapshots and a few hopeful words, enticing enough for us to send a staffer to Savannah to meet Nancy Jo Hooper, the walnut-haired 20-year-old who was to become this February’s Playmate. Hazel-eyed Nancy Jo has lived all her life with her parents and younger sister in the same Georgia town, so small that she asked us not to name it, because if six visitors arrived at once they’d cause a traffic jam. (“Georgia Peach.” Playboy, February 1964.)

Actually, I’m pretty sure that is bullshit and she was from Spartanburg, South Carolina. The small-town thing is true, but the Georgia part is a smokescreen, just like the name she is modeling under — it’s similar enough to her real facts to have the ring of truth, but is not quite the truth itself. Understandable subterfuge in a person trying to make a national name for herself under her real name. But I’ll get to there.

Now a telephone-company employee, this Southern bell ringer previously clerked in a drugstore, there heard Playboy purchasers tell her she was Playmate material herself.

Discarding daydreams of discovery, she took the initiative by sending us snapshots of herself, because, as she explained in a caramel drawl, “It occurred to me that no one from Playboy would ever find me here on his own.” (Ibid.)

Nancy Jo’s flight to Chicago for test shots marked her first airplane trip, and her first visit to any city besides Savannah. Soft-mannered, soft-spoken and shy (“I really enjoy walking alone in the park”), well-read Nancy Jo offers the sort of attractions that could once more set armies marching through Georgia. (Ibid.)

Also they would march to a second Civil War because of Nancy’s controversial positions on state’s rights and slave ownership. (Joke. I just thought the write-up got a little overreaching there.)

AMBITIONS: To become a wife and mother.
TURN-ONS: Shoes of all kinds.
TURNOFFS: Insincerity, rudeness.
I LOVE BEING A PLAYMATE: Because I’ll look back on it as an important experience of my youth.

(Playmate data sheet)

PLAY ME SOME: Louis Armstrong, Al Hirt.
GREAT FLICKS: “Jane Eyre,” “Wuthering Heights.”
THEY SAY I RESEMBLE: Sophia Loren. Do you think?

Always a fan of a Brontë-loving girl. And Satchmo, too? Right on! And yes. She looks like Sophia Loren. Keep that in mind as I go on, here. Because it comes up again.

Okay, so in a search for Nancy Jo Hooper, I ran across a post at “If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger (There’d be a lot of dead copycats),” to which I already link in my blogroll but I’m happy to provide a specific post link here. It was a critique of the lovely lighting and photography done in her spread.

A gentleman commented to that post that he was looking for Nancy for a class reunion. He said her real name was Nancy Ann Harrison, and she was from Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Now, if you’ve been following the comments today, you’ll see I was way off base about thinking I’d turned up the modern incarnation of a former Playmate, although I am happy to report about it because I stand by being pleased to have discovered the work of the nonetheless wonderful Ms. L. F. (at whose request posts pertaining to her have been removed.) Sure, it ended up good because I got to read some new stuff and learn some new ideas, but I was understandably gun-shy about turning up a false lead again.

Being wrong is cool and it’s important because we are forced outside our comfort zones, given the opportunity to uncover something new and to show humility and the ability to learn from our mistakes, but, cheeseballs! I don’t want to always be the chump ringing in my buzzer only to stammer out the “incorrect” answer — being right sometimes is nice too.

So, I dug as hard as I could this time, much more strictly with myself than last time. And I turned up the following clipping from the Spartanburg, South Carolina Herald-Journal, an article dated July 8, 1962.

Yeah, she is the same girl, and yep, she still looks like Sophia — although the weight they give in the article is heavier than the one she listed two years later in Playboy. Either she went on a diet or the same fact-wrangler that invented her alternate name for her Playboy appearance also took liberties with her already-admirable figure.

Ms. Harrison placed as second runner-up in the Miss Dixie pageant; first place was Rita Wilson of Humbold, Tennessee (center in the above picture), and first runner-up was Susan Woodall of Weldon, North Carolina. There were twenty girls who competed altogether in the 1962 Miss Dixie pageant.

If you are like me and have been forced in your life, often against your will, to take your pageants seriously, or even if you are lucky enough to be unlike me and have never accidentally called the city of Patterson “a shithole” into an open mic during the Miss Apricot Fiesta competition, you may still be interested to read a little run-down of the Miss Dixie pageant rules.

Via the amazing Pageantopolis:

Miss Dixie (“Queen of the South”)

This southern states regional pageant was held annually during the Fourth of July holiday in Daytona Beach (FL) since 1946. It was held by the Daytona Beach Chamber of Commerce. It seemed to have been discontinued in 1968.

To be eligible for the Miss Dixie contest, the girls had to have placed first or second in another major contest and be from Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Missouri, Arkansas, Texas or the District of Columbia.

They must be unmarried & between the ages of 17 and 26. Eligible Southern beauties had until June 18 (2 weeks prior) to file their applications. From 1957 onwards, the first 20 successful applications were accepted for the pageant. There were a Top 7, from which the Top 3 were announced.

Each contestant was judged on five qualities: intellect (5%), personality (10%), appearance in evening gown (15%), talent (30%), and appearance in swim suit (30%). The judges each picked the girls they rated from first to seventh in each classification of competition. The girl with the highest cumulative point score became Miss Dixie. (source)

Nancy qualified to enter the Miss Dixie contest by earning the title of Miss Sun Fun South Carolina, a pageant held at Myrtle Beach. She came in second in the national competition about a month before the Miss Dixie pageant, on June 9, 1962 — the winner was Ginger Poitevint of Huntsville, Alabama. Nancy made an impressive showing at the Miss Sun Fun USA contest; besides being first runner-up in the pageant as a whole, she also took top honors in the Swimsuit and Photogenic categories.

As they are rather obviously the same gal, I can only conjecture that all that pretty airy nonsense about Georgia was malarkey the same way Nancy’s name was, although it’s easy to see how they came up with it. I assume the strategy went, keep the first name, Nancy, because it is common and easy enough to keep track of, then use Jo (like Jo-Ann) instead of Ann, though as far as Harrison instead of Hooper — actually, that one I don’t know. Your guess is as good as mine. I’m out of gas on thinking I knew how this went!

Dig the little trumpet hand puppet — super-cute. I would like to as a final grateful thought link once more to Pageantopolis , without which most of this post would’ve been boring and impossible, and the site is really great and tons of fun — I think I am going to have to start featuring more links to the work and online scrapbook of the very fun Donald West. Thanks!

Valentine Vixen: Laura Misch Owens, Miss February 1975

So many Valentine Vixens to post up in all their fun and special glory, so little time left in February all of a sudden! Yikes. As with the NSFW November project, I am once more faced with the question of whether I’ve bit off more than I can chew. It’s a challenge, but that’s all right: I was so selective with this month’s lonelyhearts ladies, handpicking only my tippy-toppy-bestest, most favoritest centerfolds, that there is literally not a single one that I am not totally psyched to share more about with you. So let’s do this!

Photographed by Richard Fegley.

The lovely and talented Laura Misch Owens was Playboy’s Miss February 1975. Those aren’t just pretty code words for taking it off on this one, dudes. Besides being beautiful, as evinced by these photographs, Ms. Owens is also a brilliant, witty, published author who happens to be forthright, charming, and absolutely-fall-down-freaking-hysterically funny. I’m going to let her talent speak for itself as I juxtapose the Playboy purple prose that accompanied her pictorial spread for them with her own take on the events, excerpted from an article she contributed to Salon.com about her time as a New Orleans bunny, written in 2005.

The headline and summary for Salon run, “When I was a Playboy Bunny in New Orleans: ‘I married a cop of easy virtue, posed nude in Hef’s magazine, drank all night at Lucky Pierre’s, and appeared in the worst movie ever made. It was Big and it was Easy, and now it’s gone.'” (“When I Was a Playboy Bunny,” Misch, Laura. 10 Sept 2005. Salon.com.)

Playboy sez: “Delta Lady: Meet Laura Misch, a New Orleans lovely who’s taken the Crescent City to her heart. Lucky New Orleans!” (“Delta Lady.” February, 1975. Playboy.)

Playboy sez:

Fresh out of high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 18-year-old ex-cheerleader Laura Misch was confronted with that same question that has plagued most new high school graduates: What now? … She pictured herself with rabbit ears and a Bunny tail. She had an idea! “I dashed off a letter, enclosed a Polaroid of myself and sent it to the New Orleans Bunny Mother, since she was the closest to Tulsa,” Laura recalls. “The next thing I knew, I was in New Orleans with a new job.”

Laura writes:

I stepped off the Braniff flight from Tulsa, Okla., at Moisant Field on Jan. 12, 1973, with $34 in my pocket and the promise of a job as a Bunny at the New Orleans Playboy Club. I was 19, with big, proud titties suitable for framing, and wearing enough Maybelline to sink a barge in the Industrial Canal. I didn’t know it yet, but I would spend the next seven years in the City That Care Forgot. By the time I escaped its humid clutches, the Big Easy would fill me up and wring me dry.

On the subject of a career in moving pictures, Playboy quotes Laura and adds their own advertiser/biz-skewed copy to her youthful sentiments, saying,

“I adore everything about New Orleans. I’ll never leave.” This creates a conflict in her life, for she also wants to be a movie star (“Who doesn’t?”) and most stars have to emigrate to Hollywood sooner or later.

No longer a Bunny since the temporary closing of the New Orleans Club some months ago, Laura has just finished an on-location shooting as an extra in Dino De Laurentiis’ new film, Mandingo, starring James Mason and Susan George. In the movie, which is about life on a slave-breeding plantation in the pre-Civil War South, Laura plays one of the girls in a Mississippi delta whorehouse. This is how she describes her big scene: “A door opens and through the doorway you see me standing there, clutching my underwear. Then I blow a sensuous kiss to a satisfied customer.” Since it was her first scene in a movie, and she appeared seminude, to boot, Laura admits to having had a certain initial apprehension. “I thought it would be awful with all those people watching me,” she says. “But they were good about it and kept their eyes on my face.” If you say so, Laura. (Playboy, February 1975.)

I had lines in those movies but only walk-ons in Mandingo and Hard Times. Strange; I always played a prostitute. Didn’t they see my shining thespian talents?

Oh, Laura. You had me at “Hello!”

This picture of Laura as a young bunny in N’Awlins is not from the Playboy pictorial spread. It accompanied her delightfully fun article for Salon.com.
For her part, the real, unvarnished, marvelously disingenous Laura says today,

I’m sure you’ve seen me in Mardi Gras Massacre, having my innards cut out by a guy wearing an Aztec mask. One Web site lists this gem as one of the worst movies ever, ever made. I’m proud. And remember “French Quarter,” with Bruce Davison and Virginia Mayo? You don’t?

That’s OK, Davison apparently doesn’t either, because he won’t list it among his credits. You can run but you can’t hide, Brucie. I was there. You were in it, pal!

Adorbably candid! Love it.

On the subject of her corrupt-cop, but seemingly loving, as much as he could be, given all time and circumstances, husband during those years, I think Ms. Misch Owens has a light and bittersweet touch, appropriately appreciative/critical/reflective (as all reviews of such relationships must always be) but not overly maudlin; a delicate balance to reach.

Somewhere along the way I had gotten married to Eddie, a cop in the French Quarter. … I thought he was terribly exciting. He’d bring me along to all-nighters at Benny’s, a joint on the levee. I was required to sit silently for hours while Eddie twirled his gold wedding band.

Benny was like 75 with about three teeth and had a 14-year-old girlfriend. This last fact struck no one but me as particularly odd or disgusting. Like everything else wild and evil in New Orleans, it was greeted with a shrug and a wink.

He introduced me to the shady characters, shady ladies and shady ways of the Crescent City that I never would have tapped into otherwise. Without him, I never would have had a private room with a private waiter — Joey Guera — at Antoine’s. Never would have had a real king cake at a family party, never would have gone fishing out of Empire, La., with so much beer aboard our little flotilla that we almost sank. And if we had, so what? There is nothing like a native New Orleanian.

I cannot, in my broken state, express strongly enough how much I aspire to acheive Ms. Misch’s disarmingly candid brand of levelheaded, logical but loving, analytical prose in regard to my own dissolving marriage some day.

We parted ways, eventually. I went down to Miami and he went back to being a bachelor. He retired from the force as a lieutenant and was freelancing as a security man at “tittie bars” and rich people’s houses Uptown on Audubon Place, last I heard.

Reporting on recent events, Ms. Misch adds the following epilogue to her relationship with her Big Easy first husband:

I phoned him just before the eye of Katrina must have passed very near his house. I got his answering machine. Some silly nonsense about how he wasn’t home, he was checking out the latest Saints trade. I said, Hey, you idiot, call me.

He hasn’t called, and now I just get static when I dial the number. C’mon, Eddie, check in. Check in, dammit.

New Orleans is gone.

Today, Ms. Misch Owens is a novelist under the name of Laura Watt and has written non-fiction for the Miami Herald, the Rocky Mountain News, and the Denver Post. Sardonic and enduringly adorable — thanks a mil for the inspiration, Ms. Misch!

Valentine Vixen: Amber Campisi, Miss February 2005

I think the lovely and talented Amber Campisi, Miss February 2005, is a really special woman from an amazing family, so it was a pleasure putting together this post, although there was sadness in it, too.

Photographed by Arny Freytag and Stephen Wayda.

As one of the managers of Campisi’s Restaurant, a family-run business that has been a Dallas favorite since 1946, Amber Campisi can be chauvinistic about her family’s cooking. “I’ll eat anything,” she says, “but I don’t usually like Italian anywhere else. The way we do it is just better.”

When the 23-year-old restaurateur visited our office, she hauled in enough oval Campisi’s pizzas to feed the staff. “My family can’t travel without them,” she says. “When we go to the Cayman Islands every year, we bring lasagna and pizzas in a cooler. It’s ridiculous.”

“There are pictures of me wearing an apron and a name tag when I was five years old,” she says. “I would go to work with my dad when I was little and stay until closing time. They’d cover me with napkins, and I’d sleep in a booth.”

Jack Ruby, a friend of Amber’s grandfather Joe, dined there the night before he shot Lee Harvey Oswald. This led the Warren Commission to interview the elder Campisi. “One of the stories is that Ruby came in and told my grandfather he was going to do it to spare the Kennedys the pain of a trial,” she says. Whatever was said that night, Dallas now has seven Campisi’s restaurants that are better known for their squisito Italian cuisine. (“Specialty of the House,” Playboy, February 2005.)

AMBITIONS: To help run the family restaurant and one day pass it on to my children.

TURN-ONS: Athletic men, someone who is confident but not cocky, and redheads.

FAVORITE COLLEGE COURSES: Nonprofit Communication, Communication Research and Argumentation

Heck yeah, charity and hot gingers — you see what I mean? This girl is super awesome. And you know she eats spaghetti. Strong family bonds, love of cooking, she’s got some great and special qualities, in my opinion. This is not some airbrushed airhead looking to launch a D-list career with her rack. Ms. Campisi seems fun-loving and genuine.

Her father, was on an E! special called Wildest Party Parents, which focused on his restaurant Campisi’s Egyptian Room.

The handlers at the E! cable network have been very soothing to Dallas restaurateur Corky Campisi, who will be featured in Friday night’s Wildest Party Parents.

“They said, ‘Don’t worry, you won’t be embarrassed,’ ” says Corky. “The previews show me with a girl’s high heel in my mouth.”

Regardless, Corky is anything but embarrassed. “As long as it’s good for business,” he says, referring to his family’s Mockingbird Lane eatery, Campisi’s Egyptian.

An E! camera crew was in Dallas in December and filmed Corky out on the town with his three daughters, former Playboy centerfold Amber Campisi and twin sisters Tara and Gina Campisi. (“Campisi puts the E! in party.” Peppard, Alan. The Dallas Morning News, May 30, 2007.)

You may hit Ms. Campisi up on the myspace, or follow her on the twitter. Sadly, Amber’s younger sister Gina just passed away last Wednesday, February 3. She was only 26. Amber got this tattoo as a memorial.

I’m sure their large family is beside themselves over losing her sister so young, especially Gina’s twin Tara. So maybe, please, don’t send Amber a bunch of pervy or weird stuff right now?

The Morning News is reporting that Gina Campisi’s death is an apparent suicide, which understandably makes the loss that much more tragic and difficult for her family to process. It’s especially tragic because she had only recently begun to build on her family’s food history and make a name for herself.

With business partner Brittany O’Daniel, Gina had opened her own restaurant, Fedora Restaurant & Lounge at One Arts Plaza, just last year. When you go to the website for Fedora, it is not only gorgeous and well-designed, but, on a fun note, it plays the “Parla più piano” (“Speak softly, love”) theme made famous in the Godfather films. It seems that, like Amber, Gina was sensitive to family traditions, stylish history, and culinary flair.

Interior shot during a party.

Fine Italian dining demands a swanky, romantic setting –– like that of Fedora Restaurant & Lounge, owned by Dallas’ Gina Campisi and Brittney O’Daniel and designed by Tyler Duncan of Duncan Design Group. Reminiscent of a scene from The Godfather or an Al Pacino mobster movie, large plush red couches, black, white and cream interiors and dramatic chandeliers give the restaurant a 1940s feel. Flat screen televisions play classic Hollywood flicks as the sensational smells of Chef Jordan’s creations waft from the kitchen. (“About Fedora,” official site)

Gina in 2008 at a DIFFA Dining by Design event in North Dallas; photograph by Christopher Wynn of Eats Blog, guidelive.com

Enter Gina Campisi. The 25-year-old granddaughter of the legendary Joe Campisi is no stranger to the local scene. Her family’s Campisi’s Egyptian has been dishing out pizza and pasta for more than 60 years, though her new restaurant is far removed from the old-school appeal of the family business. …

Campisi says her aim was to create a place that was hip and modern while appealing to a broad cross section of Dallas diners. “And really, I just wanted to stay as true to my roots and upbringing as possible,” she says.

For delivering credible, updated Italian food with flair* – and an approachably modest price point – I’ll give Fedora a tip of the hat.

(“Restaurant Review: Fedora.” Harwell, Kim. The Dallas Morning News, March 13, 2009.)

*Please note that the chef at the time of Ms. Harwell’s review, Christopher Patrick, is no longer with Fedora. Beginning in December 2009, the kitchen has been headed by Chef Jordan Rogers.

All of my condolences to the Campisi family, and R.I.P. to Gina Campisi. Male a che muori; s’acconza la menestra (“Pity he who dies; those who live, continue to prepare the supper.”).

Valentine Vixen: Jessica St. George, Miss February 1965

Miss February 1965 was the lovely and talented Jessica St. George, the first Greek centerfold. Can I get a “hell, yeah” for my sisters across the sea? I am all for national pride, but it’s my belief that Mediterranean ladies must lay aside our ancient Greco-Roman differences and stick together when we are swarmed by A-cup blonde WASP-y types.

Photographed by Mario Casilli.

Ελληνική n. – (τυπογρ.) σαλόνι, γυμνό μοντέλο του κεντρικού σαλονιού περιοδικού.
translation:
centerfold n. – (sĕn’tər-fōld’) a magazine center spread, especially a foldout of an oversize photograph or feature.

The title of the article that accompanied this distinctly divergent pictorial (some shots are on one day, inside, with bad makeup, and the rest are really good and in-and-outdoors on a different day with much better styling) was, I wish I was kidding, “Greek Baring Gifts.” Ouch. I thought I made bad puns. Man. I am embarrassed for you right now, Playboy, not gonna lie. I mean, we’re still cool — but, dudes, I cannot even look at you right now.

In the interior photographs, Ms. St. George looks a little uncomfortable. Also, the stylist seems to have slightly wonked up her eye makeup, so her left eye looks different in size or level from the right. Totally outside Ms. St. George’s control. She is doing her best to awkwardly work it despite the handicap of shitty styling. In the outdoors shots, she is more relaxed in appearance and her smile looks less stiff.

PEOPLE I ADMIRE: Helen of Troy and President John F. Kennedy. She had complete command of men, and he was concerned about young people.

I wonder what Ms. St. George’s opinion of his widow Jacqueline Kennedy was after her sudden marriage to Aristotle Onassis. She snatched him right out from over beloved Greek-Italian opera diva and personal patron saint Maria Callas, who most Greek- and Italian-Americans idolized, celebrating her tempestuous romance with Onassis as much as her famous chilling voice.

I love Maria very, very much, and I used to be a big Jackie guy when I was younger, but no more. I know it’s unpopular and some people look at it as sacreligous to so much as cast a smidge of a shadow of hate on good ol’ Jacqueline Bouvier-Kennedy-Onassis-Polly-Wolly-Doodle-All-Day, that paragon of poise, style, Daddy Issues, and anorexia, but facts are facts.

And at some point in time, if you are going to give a serious read to the tangled web of 1960’s social history, and Ari Onassis and his interactions with the extraordinary, talented, and occasionally scandalous women his fat, arrogant, allegedly bisexual ass managed to land, you must choose sides; my personal journey through the threads of this time and my notions of fairness in love and war lead irrevocably to me renouncing Jackie and her neurotic little sister Lee forever in favor of my Maria. Team Callas. Period.

That was a long digression. Sorry, I get worked up. Apologies to Ms. St. George. Back to you, kiddo!

My favorite shot from the spread.

Jessica vows it has nothing to do with her Greek heritage, but we must admit we found just the slightest trace of chauvinism in the fact that her favorite music star is George Chakiris. (“Greeks Baring Gifts,” Playboy. February 1965.)

A thousand times, yes. Good call, Jessica! You may know George Chakiris as Bernardo, leader of the Puerto Rican street gang the Sharks and overprotective older brother to Natalie Wood in the role of Maria in West Side Story, for which he won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1961. He was a real hottie. I always thought he was much, much better-looking than Tony, the lead.

I wonder what he’s up to today?

Looking back, [at 70] Chakiris is satisfied with his career. Chakiris has escorted Marilyn Monroe (he was one of the dancers) during the “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” number in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, he recorded several albums in the 1960s, he performed Gershwin songs for audiences in Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe and Monte Carlo, he starred in numerous television guest roles—a spot on Hawaii Five-0 is among his favorites—and he played a villain on Dallas. He last starred [as Mr. Rochester] in a London stage production of Jane Eyre in 1997. (“A Boy Like That,” Holleran, Scott. Box Office Mojo. March 23, 2003.)

Well, that is all some dang awesome shit, if I do say so myself. Especially being Mr. Rochester — heat!

Ms. St. George’s ambition was to be a professional dancer and actress. No word on if she achieved her goal, but if I discover more I will update.

Valentine Vixens: Inaugural edition featuring Margaret Scott

Today, instead of crawling back in to bed, I am forcing myself to find a new project that will hopefully start me writing every day again. You know me and the playmates: spoonfuls of sugar help the medicine go down! With that idea, twenty-nine rays of sunshine to light up your lonelyhearted February are headed your way: a Valentine Vixen a day. Beginning right … now.

Photographed by Baumgarth Calendar Co and purchased by Hef in 1953.

Another of Hefner’s fortunate discoveries from the well-filled files of the John Baumgarth Calendar Company in Melrose Park, Illinois was pretty-in-pink Miss February, Margaret Scott. Miss Scott’s shapely figure and ultrafeminine dressing-room set apparently made her an instant hit with the readers who purchased the third issue of Hef’s infant magazine: she became an extremely popular Playmate, drawing stacks of letters from the legions of her enthusiastic supporters. There’s even a chance that Margaret posed again under another name. See Miss April 1954. (The Playmate Book, 1996)

In April 1954, Margaret appeared as the “gatefold” model under the name Marilyn Waltz, again in a picture purchased by Hef from Baumgarth Calendar Company (rest assured, I am chasing that lead down to see more pictures or my name is not Cheesecake McVintagepants).

Photographed by Baumgarth Calendar Co.

For her first official Playboy shoot, the lovely and talented Wisconsin-born model posed again as Marilyn Waltz the following April, in 1955, as the Playmate of the Month. Why, look at that, I already have that one saved due to the fact that I was planning a thingy on vintage centerfolds in tacky capri pants — there are laughably plenty.

Photographed by Hal Adams.

Thanks to her caginess and Hugh Hefner using nudie calendar photography during the fledgling years of the magazine Marilyn/Margaret can lay claim to being one of only two women who are three-time Playmates, giving them the most appearances as centerfolds of any women to ever be featured in the magazine. (The other is Janet Pilgrim, Miss July and December 1955, and Miss October 1956.) But Marilyn did not reveal her multiple appearances for over forty years.

After Hef broadly speculated as to the similarities between Marilyn Waltz and Margaret Scott in 1996’s The Playmate Book, Marilyn contacted Playboy and confirmed that both models were her: she had posed for Baumgarth Calendar Co. as Margaret Scott when she was younger, but had posed under her real name subsequently.

Waltz received more fan mail — ironically, for her Margaret Scott appearance — than any other Playmate in 1954. Her February 1954 Margaret Scott centerfold appearance is seen as a classic. (the wiki)

Marilyn Arduth Waltz Jordan died December 23, 2006, in Medford, Oregon. She was 76.

Welcome, porny people! Now how about lending that filthy hand to a good cause?

First off, thanks to the — as of this writing — over 6,400 people who’ve swung by the site today! Super-cool!* I see you are being linked by a site called pussycalor.com. My thanks again to you for your visits, and a tip of my hat to the fine folks at the site referring you here for the, erm, clever wordplay in their company title (“Pussy Galore” + “hot” en español, I imagine, right? get it? … it’s a decent enough pun; I give it a 60 but I can’t dance to it).

Dawn Richard, Miss May 1957. Photographed by Ed DeLong and David Sutton.

However, now that you’re here, and I’ve got these vintage cheesecake Playboy centerfolds helping me hold your attention, LeVar Burton’s** twitter and I would like to bend your ear a tick on this whole Haiti earthquake and subsequent increased housing and famine catastrophe. This article in the Miami Herald details legit relief organizations through which you can help with time, money, and food donations the displaced and surviving persons affected by yesterday’s devastating earthquake in Haiti, which is unfortunately only going to compound their existing problems as a developing nation.

Miss December 1959, Pat Sheehan. Photographed by Sam Wu.

Those are all fine and worthy causes if you give the list a genuine spin, but I sense that if you have landed here, you are probably impatient to get on with other things, and I empathize to a point with you on the whole “utter-lack-of-attention-span” thing. (Everyone blames MTV but I think it started with cereal box-backs, because I never had cable and I’ve an awful itchy trigger finger in almost every situation) Here is the super-fast-easy way to seal the deal:

Miss January 1957, June Blair. Photographed by Hal Adams.

In America, text the word “HAITI” to the number 90999 to donate $10 to the Red Cross. It will automatically come off your phone bill. How easy is that? $10 is not that much, and this is coming from an extremely broke person. So why don’t you take your hand off your dick (only for a moment, don’t worry — I’m not asking for miracles), fetch up the cell phone you’ve undoubtedly parked in your pocket, and take a second to donate even the low amount of $10 to the Red Cross’s special fund, through which, guaranteed, 100% of your donation goes to Haitian quake relief efforts. The playmates you are gawking at would be super, super impressed. That is why they are all in red: for the Red Cross. (Yes, I have so many playmate pictures saved that I was able to cull out a few scantily red-clad ones for just this entry — and even then I narrowed it to these, my faves.)

Miss March 1957, Sandra Edwards. Photographed by Peter Gowland, a dear patron saint. Right on!

I am not telling you how to live your life, just saying it is a quick and easy way to ease suffering while we comfortably enjoy and count ourselves lucky another carefree, nudie-pic-seeking day. Thanks for your time!



*As I said to the Gentleman earlier today, “I have supported the porn industry for years. It’s about time they returned the favor.”

**You’re darned-tootin’ I follow Geordi La Forge on the twitter. And I did not think it was possible he could be more of a nerd than I always imagined, but he is. He’s seen Avatar, like, five times. I almost stopped following him cause it was all he was on about for weeks. But I forgive him.

NSFW November: The Itty-Bitty-Titty Holy War — marvelous Miss November 2001, Lindsey Vuolo

Saved the best for second-to-last, guys.

Your magnificent Miss November 2001 was the lovely and talented and unremittently marvelous, in this shiksa’s opinion, Lindsey Vuolo. Ms Vuolo’s interview with Playboy touched on her recent trip to Israel, included a picture from her bat mitzvah, and set off a shitstorm of reactionary crossfire about pornography, sex, and religion in the conservative Jewish community, from which she valiantly refused to back down. Preach it, garrl!

Photographed by Arny Freytag – for some reason in this picture she looks like Raquel Welch, which is nothing to sneeze at, but she is a beauty in her own right and the resemblance is not present in the other pictures.

Lindsey’s Italian father converted to Judaism to marry her Russian mother. “I traveled to Israel as part of an exchange program and it was an amazing trip,” she says. “Being in Jerusalem was so emotional for me — I broke down and cried.” (“Lindsey,” Playboy, November 2001)

Holy shit, if that did not apparently ruffle feathers for her to be naked emotionally as well as physically by describing what being Jewish meant to her in terms of her personal identity and emotions. (You can bare your breasts, and you can bare your bajango*, but you can’t bare those with your soul and be religious!)

*thank you, Tina Fey, for the term “bajango.” I’ll get to the Playboy interview where she first dropped that term for ladyparts another day.

What happened next was, this guy Rabbi Shmuley Boteach caught wind of her appearance –especially her emphasis on her religion and what it meant to her identity– and publicly took Lindsey to task for posing for Playboy (though he had himself appeared in the magazine promoting his book, Kosher Sex).

Feminists and porn-purveyors alike took Lindsey’s side, and soon everyone from rabbis to radical social theorists was weighing in with their opinions on faith and sex. These are two topics that everyone has touch them in some personal way, so I’m not surprised that people felt personally authorized to comment on the issue. I remember noting in college classes that the discussions during lecture in which everyone was the most engaged usually involved universal human issues like religion, sex, or love. Everyone experiences these things, so everyone has an opinion!

Taking advantage of the publicity which resulted from the itty-bitty-titty holy war, Boteach enticed her to come to a recorded and Extremely Accusatory “discussion” with him of the issue of pornography and Judaism vis-a-vis what the religion’s teachings were and how pornography impacts marriage, traditional ideals of femininity, and sexuality. She had the balls to show up, and not only that, defend herself. Reading the interview, I felt ashamed. I could have never made it through to the end the way she does. I’m easily humiliated by disapproving men. Not so Ms. Vuolo. She has an admirable self-awareness and a respectful but strong spine of steel. Check some of these excerpts, which I’ve thoughtfully and even thought-provokingly interwoven with the quotes from the “interview”:

Shmuley Boteach: So tell me what you think about the following ideas, okay? Number one: Pornography or Playboy ultimately, far from being sexy and titillating, is actually boring and monotonous because the moment you see someone’s body in its entirety, the first few minutes, sure, it’s very exciting but after that nothing is left to the imagination. It loses its erotic allure. I mean, all studies show that when women go to bed with guys too early, it almost always destroys the relationship because the thrill of the chase is gone, the mystery is gone. The human body requires mystique in order to retain its attractiveness. There also has to be the involvement of the mind in order for there to be fantasy, and nudity and sexual over-explicitness actually hinders fantasy.

For example, as a marriage counselor, I always say to wives, don’t ever walk around the bedroom naked unless it’s time for sex and he has to earn the right to see your body naked because–


Lindsey Vuolo: I disagree with that.


SB: You disagree with that?


LV: Yeah. Because you know, my husband–well, I don’t have a husband but if I had a husband, and we share everything together and I’m his, I’ll run around naked for him. That’s for him, I mean, then he doesn’t need to see anyone else naked.

SB: I wish what you were saying was true but according to the Hite report the fact that 75% of husbands are unfaithful and the fact that half of marriages end in divorce shows that unfortunately men need variety when they feel they get bored. Many men who cheat on their wives claim to love their wives. They do it only because they need something new. So clearly, it is very possible to get bored of your wife’s body, no matter how much she runs around for you.


LV: Well, I think for all time men will always look at women whether it’s their wives or someone else. And I don’t think that they get bored, you know, they look–


RS: No, no, we know they look at women’s bodies. The question is, will they look at the same woman’s body. You’re Miss November. They’re not going to make you Miss December under any circumstances. The reason is the guys have seen you and they’ve just seen you. They want someone new now. Doesn’t that alone prove to you that pornography gets boring?

Playboy has used you and you’ll never be a playmate again.


LV: I posed for this for me. So if I’m degrading anyone, I’m just degrading myself. What other women do–


SB: But the biggest sins in life are where we hurt ourselves even more than other people.


LV: But I don’t feel like I’m hurting myself.

Holy fuckballs, what a passel of ice-cold punches to the gut. If you have sex or display yourself as sexual, you have used up your ace in the hole, blown your wad of feminine mystique, as it were, and will forever forth be undervalued. Um … is this so? I don’t even know! I just want to go shower and cry! Bitch magazine, help a Catholic girl with deep-seated Daddy Issues out:

Unwilling to cow to the rabbi, (who, it should be noted, promoted his own book in Playboy) Lindsey stood her ground, explaining that she had done nothing wrong. According to Lindsey, Playboy doesn’t even count as pornography because to her the word conjures up images of “penetration, urination, and things like that.” (“My Meidel is a Centerfold,” Bitch Magazine, Deborah Kolben, May 2002.)

Okay, well, at least I know other women will give me a hug and a “it’s okay, honey,” whether or not we are any of us sure about anything after the tirade about how men will grow tired of us and we must not be naked in front of even our husbands.

So. Quick word about this shoot: okay, obviously I have a majah girl-brain-crush on Lindsey Vuolo, but, strictly from an unbiased perspective, from the artistic standpoint, I strongly believe that this photoshoot stands head and shoulders above most of the others from the 2000’s.

It has a clear unity of vision: the story is, this super-super-cute, vintage-lingerie-loving, wholesome, upbeat gal works at an old-fashioned pie-and-coffee kind of diner as a pastry chef or baker of some kind, and it's after-hours.

If this does not melt your heart with its brain-asplodin’ cuteness, you are made of STONE and we have nothing to offer each other.

First she’s with you in the dinette, then she’s showing you around at home. It’s cut and dry and adorable as shit. Love it. Okay! Back to the hot button side of the story. Final thought, for clarification and prompting of to-be-determined further discussion:

Some have incorrectly claimed that Vuolo is the first Jewish Playmate. Vuolo herself has agreed it is more likely that she merely is the first openly Jewish Playmate. (the wiki)

This has been certainly a long enough entry already, all apologies, so perhaps we ought to save the important and striking issue of why a beautiful woman looking to be famous in America might consider her Judaism a liability rather than an asset and choose to downplay this important aspect of her heritage and womanhood (*cough, cough* Holly Madison) for another day.

But Don’t Think I’m Forgetting. I got a memory like Babar — but a figure like Bettie Page. Ow! Call me!

NSFW November: Pat Russo, Miss November 1965

Another playmate who began as a bunny, 1965’s Miss November was the lovely and talented Pat Russo, a Connecticut girl who modeled briefly in Manhattan for the famous Barbizon Agency(kind of scammy in my opinion but some real careers have started there, so I’m not going to hate too hard). She hated the cold, relocated to Florida not too much later, and said in her interview that, after one winter in Florida, “‘Autumn in New York’ was just another pretty song as far as I was concerned!” She was scouted for the centerfold while working at the Miami club (“Pat Pending,” Playboy, November 1965).

Photographed by Pompeo Posar

This is kind of a weird one. I believe that Playboy did two different photoshoots (very common), but the stylists communicated poorly … if they communicated at all. Here’s what I think happened with this shoot.

Maybe the people in charge of hair and makeup on the different days this shoot was done were in a fight and not speaking, or maybe they had a conversation about ideas for Ms. Russo’s “look” but came away without a unity of vision, or even maybe some other type of accident or act of God intervened vis-a-vis the two different colored hairpieces, styling, etc. I mean, the girl is blonde one time and solidly ash brunette the next; she doesn’t even look like the pictures were taken in the same year, let alone afternoon.

Whatever happened here, too much time has passed to tell. But the end result is that it appears from some of the pictures, when you take the spread as a whole, as though Ms. Russo could be two almost totally different women.

All pictures are of her, though — I verified it with her Yahoo! groups fan club leader (last post on their bulletin board was in December of 2006, but the moderator still checks his email, bless his vintage-pin-up-lovin’ heart; thanks again for the lightning-fast response time, buddy!).

Speaking of styling, the cover is a blatant and (I checked the table of contents) totally unattributed rip off of the magnificent, incredible, erotic work of photographer and personal patron saint Sam Haskins, specifically his picture book/mystery/western short story Cowboy Kate (1964). I guess imitation is the highest form of flattery, but I am so genuinely bummed and perturbed by the fact that you might mistake the originality and brilliance of this composition —

Totally uncredited rip-off photographed by Pompeo Posar. (Model’s name is Beth Hyatt.) Pompeo, I am hella disappointed in you.

— the parted lips which echo the round opening of the gun barrel, the swinging curtain of blonde hair beneath the rounded black cowboy hat, the always-a-great-idea toplessness — as belonging to some cover designer at Playboy (all respect to their often-clever work) and not to the living god that is Sam Haskins that I do believe, holy shit, you guys, December is going to have to be Official Sam Haskins Month! I will do my best daily throughout December to scrounge up some of my saved photos from his enormous and thought-provoking body of work that are either permissible or I can reasonably say are ads and therefore in the public domain.

Boy, oh boy! Let’s see if I can continue my streak of not getting sued before the year is up!

It’s nice to have goals.

Advice: NSFW Sophia Loren schooling on true sexy glamour edition

I think the quality of sexiness comes from within. It is something that is in you or it isn’t and it really doesn’t have much to do with breasts or thighs or the pout of your lips.

A woman’s dress should be like a barbed-wire fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view.

Hey, models and movie starlets of today! Want to be a timeless, beautiful, glamorous international sex symbol like the world-famously gorgeous Sophia? Ms. Loren sez: eat something. If you are confused about how to eat and need help getting started, she even has cookbooks to help you along.

Final thoughts on eating and sexiness from Sophia:

Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.

and

Spaghetti can be eaten most successfully if you inhale it like a vacuum cleaner.

Do it for the curves, ladies. Feel free to keep me posted on your progress!

NSFW November: “I’m with the band.” — Bebe Buell, Miss November 1974

If you need a snack or a potty break, now’s the time. Cause the lovely and talented Bebe Buell is about to suck up your entire life until you are through with this entry. … Welcome to the jungle. Better men than you have been lost in its vines.

Before I go on with her basically amazing life-story, I’d like to point out that this gorgeous slice of strawberry cheesecake was basically the hottest ticket in the musical world in the 1970’s, and she rocked a pretty plush rug Down There. All-natural goodness, from a kind and confident lady. What gives with the kind of freakish waxed hardwood floors I am seeing in commercial porn lately? Meanwhile, on the flip side, the most popular amateurs over on the redtube and the tube8 generally sport Hair Down There and feature a throwback to women in pornography and erotica looking convincingly real. Vivid Video, this recently rediscovered art of the legitimate nude, this sexytimes pictures and video trend informed by raw, sexy authenticity, is why you guys are now losing the game almost completely to amateur streaming videos. Pubes and kissing are what make the difference between a so-so, mainly unconvincing video and a really special one. Write that down. Okay, so on with the show.

In 1972 while working as a teenage model in New York City, Buell met and dated rock star Todd Rundgren for several years. During and after her sometimes open relationship with Rundgren, she also became intimate with many other famous musicians, including Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, and Steven Tyler while maintaining homes with Rundgren in both New York City and the Woodstock, New York area until late 1977.

Buell then moved on to Rod Stewart and in the summer of 1978, she began a tempestuous affair with the married but separated Elvis Costello which continued on and off until 1984. She was also involved with the late Stiv Bators and actor Jack Nicholson. — the wiki.

Okay, so the backstory, which is really more like a sexual history. Look, I think it is wretchedly unfair when a lady’s life story is framed by the boys she has bagged, but holy jeebus, Bebe Buell. How can I not bring it up??

Oh, you. You wonderfully nutty, gorgeous-movie-star-baby-spawning, Penny-Lane-in-Almost-Famous-inspiring, strawberry blonde minx! Gawd, how I love her and her sweet, vivacious life outlook. This chick is truly endless entertainment, you guys. I mean it. And she is sweet as hell, too. A real person!

And we should all kiss her feet for bringing that little daughter of hers into this world. Who is it?

NSFW November: Barbara Cameron, Miss November 1955

The lovely and talented Barbara Cameron, Playboy November 1955’s Playmate of the month, cover shot by Arthur James.

The picture that was selected by Playboy’s editor as the centerfold was so bad in my opinion, such a disservice to the hokey, natural, kind of amicably donkey-faced, toothy beauty of Barbara Cameron…

Shitty, unflattering photo by Lawrence Tirschel.

…that I absolutely, categorically had to include the rest of the shots from her feature.

It’s hard to believe it is even the same woman. What a difference when she is in an environment and with a photographer with whom she was comfortable enough to really smile.

I think she had a genuine playfulness that comes across in these black and white shots, by whomever they are, than the stiffness screaming from her postures in that godawful centerfold picture by Tirschel and the only moderately better cover photo by Arthur James.

Cute, right?

That could be Santa Monica or it could be Montauk, I truly have no idea. Playboy was still on the East Coast at that time, I think. So probably more like the Jersey shore, but there is practically no way of telling.

Long story short, these b&w beach shots are sooo much better, right? They barely look like they were taken at the same time of the year, and I don’t even know if they were done by the same photographer (I suspect not). There is basically zero info on Barbara Cameron, the model, on the internet, though ironically info on conservative Christian author Barbara Cameron, the mother of Kirk and Candace — of Growing Pains and Full House, respectively — abounds. Heh. I’m so immature for laughing about that.

“Prior to September 1959, Playboy did not ask Playmates to complete Data Sheets. ” — Official Playmate Directory (extremely exceedingly not at all safe for work unless you want to get fired and then SET ON fire if you have a female boss)

I assume it was a fake name and the real details of the model are lost to the ages, which is a shame because she has a kind of genuine, athletic, self-deprecating charm that lacks in a lot of these faux-coy pinups. If you know anything about her, holler.

NSFW November Inaugural Edition!: Miss November 1954, Diane Hunter

NSFW November Inaugural Edition – Diane Hunter, the first Miss November, Playboy, 1954. And a redhead, no less.

The lovely and talented Diane Hunter’s official website states that she has the distinction of being the only living model to have appeared in the very first issue of Playboy, in December 1953. A popular pinup model, she was highly sought to pose for art, too, perhaps due in part to her strong resemblance to legendary burlesque star Tempest Storm, who was out of Hollywood at the time and hiding out in my husband’s hometown with her gangster boyfriend to avoid umpteen contracts for mob hits from Mickey Cohen down in L.A. It always comes back to dirty, filthy, Porno Portland, doesn’t it?

Anyway, having appeared in the debut issue of Playboy, with Marilyn Monroe as the centerfold of sorts (official centerfolds didn’t really start until ’54), Diane came back to the magazine to pose as the centerfold for November 1954.

According to the wiki, the average payout for a centerfold appearance at this time was around $500. Personally, I think that’s pretty good money.

“Retired and single these days, Diane lives on Social Security, odd jobs and whatever money she earns off of her photos. She enjoys life and loves to hear from her fans.” — Official Site

Her real name is Gale Rita Morin, and yes, you can email her any ol' time to request autographed pictures or just shoot the breeze: GaleRMorin@aol.com. “All photos are 8″x10″ and sell for $20, each hand signed by Diane Hunter. Send a SASE or include $4 for postage” (thus spake the official site).

Here’s a couple of recent pictures to wind things down.

I think that is some impressive staying power and I hope you think the same. God bless the good lord and the old habit of corset training: the woman looks awfully damned good for 75 and seems to have kept a sunny outlook. Good on her. I’m feeling more cheerful about this month already.

Join me tomorrow for more NSFW November!